It's cherry blossom season!
This is how my day went. I woke up at 6:30 and showered. I made some udon, which was deliciously scalding. I need to wait for my food to cool a little, I think. My fellow exchange students and I sallied forth from our rooms to make the walk to the Hiyoshi train station, which is about a mile away from our building and right outside of Tokyo proper. It's a pretty lively suburb town, if you can even call it that, in its own right. The concentration of stores and restaurants, up and down rows of streets, is really incredible. It's quite common to eat out here in Japan, and an amazing variety of tiny establishments coexist in a way that's really hard to properly describe. I've yet to see an empty shop or storefront.
We had our Japanese language placement test. It's pretty clear how students get sorted; the test's three components got steadily more difficult until, for me, they were completely impossible. I think I did alright. One of the australian guys I met had looked up a few rock gyms, and after the test we headed to the nearby Ebisu section of Tokyo for some climbing. We wandered around this charming little neighborhood until we found the place, which turned out to be underground and pretty much a basement. It was still a lot of fun and I got a lot of great climbing in.
Last night I attended a BU alumni reception in Tokyo, which was held at a really ritzy place downtown. There I heard about a meet-up today in a cherry blossom park for foreigners. I wanted to check it out, post-rock climbing, but I wasn't really sure how to get to the park so I headed back to Hiyoshi. Things went astray and my train turned into a limited express, bypassing my station. I'm alright with that though; when I finally got back to Hiyoshi and was making the walk back to my place, I ran into my friends. An about face and perhaps another 50 minutes worth of train rides later, I was with them at the park. We saw a lot of drunk japanese people. We met a lot of drunk foreigners.
After eating dinner, we ran into one of those crazy photo booth places. I have never been into one before, and apparently the ones in Asia are special in that after the photo session is over you can add crazy things in to the photos before printing them. Anyway, it was a lot of fun. I am now looking forward to giving my aching feet a rest. Hopefully I did well on my placement test and everything will be smooth sailing from here on out.
We had our Japanese language placement test. It's pretty clear how students get sorted; the test's three components got steadily more difficult until, for me, they were completely impossible. I think I did alright. One of the australian guys I met had looked up a few rock gyms, and after the test we headed to the nearby Ebisu section of Tokyo for some climbing. We wandered around this charming little neighborhood until we found the place, which turned out to be underground and pretty much a basement. It was still a lot of fun and I got a lot of great climbing in.
Last night I attended a BU alumni reception in Tokyo, which was held at a really ritzy place downtown. There I heard about a meet-up today in a cherry blossom park for foreigners. I wanted to check it out, post-rock climbing, but I wasn't really sure how to get to the park so I headed back to Hiyoshi. Things went astray and my train turned into a limited express, bypassing my station. I'm alright with that though; when I finally got back to Hiyoshi and was making the walk back to my place, I ran into my friends. An about face and perhaps another 50 minutes worth of train rides later, I was with them at the park. We saw a lot of drunk japanese people. We met a lot of drunk foreigners.
After eating dinner, we ran into one of those crazy photo booth places. I have never been into one before, and apparently the ones in Asia are special in that after the photo session is over you can add crazy things in to the photos before printing them. Anyway, it was a lot of fun. I am now looking forward to giving my aching feet a rest. Hopefully I did well on my placement test and everything will be smooth sailing from here on out.